To get to the Super Bowl on time, Taylor Swift took a private jet from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then hustled to Las Vegas. The carbon removal company Spiritus estimated that her journey of roughly 5,500 miles produced about 40 tons of carbon dioxide — about what is generated by charging nearly 5 million cell phones. But don’t worry, the company assured her critics: It would take those emissions right back out of the sky.

“Spiritus wants to help Taylor and her Swifties ‘Breathe’ without any CO2 ‘Bad Blood,’” it said in a pun-laden pitch to reporters. “It’s a touchdown for everyone.”

The startup is among dozens, if not hundreds, of businesses trying to permanently remove climate-warming gases from the atmosphere. Its approach involves drawing carbon directly from the air and burying it, but others sink it in the ocean. Last week, Graphyte, a venture backed by Bill Gates, began compacting sawdust and other woody waste that are rich in carbon into bricks that it will bury deep underground. 

Spiritus says “sponsoring carbon offsets is a step toward environmental responsibility, not an endorsement of luxury flights” and added that “celebrities are going to take private jets regardless of what Spiritus does.” Even before the company stepped in, Swift reportedly planned to purchase offsets that more than covered her travel. But some climate experts say moves like Spiritus’ illustrate the dangerous direction the rapidly growing carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, industry is headed.

“The worry is that carbon removal will be something we do so that business-as-usual can continue,” said Sara Nawaz, director of research at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy. “We need a really big conversation reframe.”

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says carbon removal will be “required” to meet climate targets, and the United States Department of Energy has a goal of bringing the cost down to $100 per ton (a price point Spiritus claims it wants to deliver as well). What concerns Nawaz is the outsize role that private companies are currently playing. 

“It’s very market-oriented: doing carbon removals for profit,” Nawaz said. That reliance on the market, she elaborated, won’t necessarily lead to the just, equitable, and scalable outcomes that she hopes CDR can achieve. “We need to take a step back.”

Nawaz co-wrote a report released today titled “Agenda for a Progressive Political Economy of Carbon Removal.” In it, she and her co-authors lay out a vision for carbon removal that shifts away from market-centric approaches to ones that are government-, community-, and worker-led.

“What they suggest is quite radical,” said Lauren Gifford, associate director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University who was not involved in the research. She supports the direction the authors advocate, adding, “They actually give us a roadmap on how to get there, and that in itself is progressive.”

Nawaz compared carbon removal’s current trajectory to the bumpy path that carbon offsets has followed. That industry, in which organizations sell credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions, has been plagued by misleading claims and perverse incentives. It has also raised environmental justice concerns where offsets are disproportionately impacting frontline communities and developing nations. For example, Blue Carbon, a company backed by the United Arab Emirates, has been buying enormous swaths of land in Africa to fuel its offsets program. 

“We don’t want to do that again with carbon removal,” she said.

Philanthropy is one possible alternative to corporate carbon removal. The report cites a nonprofit organization called Terraset that puts tax-deductible donations toward CDR projects (including Spiritus’). But, Nawaz says, that approach won’t grow quickly or sustainably enough to remove the many gigatons of emissions needed to meaningfully address climate change. 

“That’s not a scalable approach,” she said. “We’re going to need so much more money.”

The report argues that communities and governments must play a central role in the industry. Nawaz cites community-driven carbon removal efforts out West, such as the 4 Corners Carbon Coalition, as examples of what might be possible on the local level. Nationally, she points to Germany’s transition away from coal as a way that governments can not only fund but fundamentally drive clean energy policy that puts workers at the fore.

Read Next

A new alliance for ‘high quality’ carbon removal highlights tensions within the industry

Emily Pontecorvo

To be sure, the United States is investing in carbon removal. The bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act included billions of dollars for technology such as regional direct air capture hubs. But the legislation mostly positions the government as a funder or purchaser of carbon removal initiatives rather than a practitioner. 

“It’s, frankly, a pretty disappointing way it’s evolving,” said Nawaz, noting, for instance, that Occidental Petroleum is among those receiving federal funding for carbon removal. She would like to see the government take a more hands-on role. “Not just government procurement of carbon removal. But actually government-led research and early-stage implementation of carbon removal.”

Gifford agrees that there are dangers in the industry relying too much on the private sector. “There’s something really scary about putting the climate crisis in the hands of wealthy tech founders,” she said. But companies have also been at the forefront of advancing the field as well. “The climate crisis is one of these things that’s all-hands-on-deck.”

Those in the private sector say their efforts are critical to ensuring that carbon removal technology is developed and deployed as quickly as possible. “Our coalition represents innovators,” said Ben Rubin, the executive director of the Carbon Business Council, a nonprofit trade association representing more than 100 carbon management companies. ”There won’t necessarily be one silver bullet.”

“There’s a long history of public-private partnerships ushering in some of the world’s latest and greatest innovations,” added Dana Jacobs, the chief of staff for the Carbon Removal Alliance, which similarly represents startups in this space. “We think carbon removal won’t be any different.”

Nawaz and her colleagues want to shake that paradigm before it’s too deeply entrenched. The alternative could be continued unjust outcomes for marginalized people and limited progress on luxury emissions, such as Swift’s flight to the Super Bowl. 

“The idea is that carbon removal is a public good,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to rely on just the private sector to provide it.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl flight shows what’s wrong with carbon removal on Feb 13, 2024.

One in 5 species of migratory birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, and insects tracked by the United Nations is threatened with extinction due to escalating environmental pressures and overexploitation by humans, according to a landmark report published Monday.

The U.N. report, “State of the World’s Migratory Species,” represents the first-ever comprehensive assessment of the conservation status and population trends of species whose members “cyclically and predictably cross one or more national jurisdictional boundaries.” Some familiar examples include green turtles, snowy owls, and Monarch butterflies.

The U.N. Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, or CMS, tracks more than 1,180 species that are already endangered or that would “significantly benefit” from being protected under an international agreement. The report finds that 44 percent of these species are experiencing population declines and 22 percent are threatened with extinction. Its release coincides with the beginning of a high-profile U.N. wildlife conservation conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where experts are calling for greater international collaboration to combat climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and excessive animal exploitation, such as hunting and fishing.

“Conservation of migratory species is extremely difficult because they cross nations, continents, even hemispheres,” Amanda Rodwald, director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, told Grist. “That requires a lot of coordination among different countries … and thinking across geopolitical boundaries.”

The report reinforces previous research on the deteriorating health of wild animal species worldwide, almost entirely due to human activities like agriculture, hunting, and fishing, as well as the pressures of climate change. In 2019, a separate U.N. panel reported that an “unprecedented” 1 million species globally were threatened with extinction. A subsequent study from late last year doubled that number to 2 million by taking into account a greater number of insects, which make up the majority of species worldwide.

Migratory species are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic pressures. Their migratory journeys require large, intact tracts of land, water, or airspace — and these tracts are getting harder to come by, whether because of dams, boat traffic, roads, skyscrapers, or other development. According to the CMS report, 75 percent of listed migratory species are affected by lost, degraded, or fragmented habitats, which can prevent them from finding mating partners or food.

A previous report of the CMS, published during the U.N.’s annual climate conference in Dubai last December, highlighted how climate change is affecting the timing of some species’ migrations and making it harder for them to reproduce and survive. As climate change progresses, other studies suggest that fragmented landscapes will preclude species from moving to cooler areas where they are more likely to survive.

The most pervasive threat to migratory species, however, is overexploitation, which the new report says is affecting three-quarters of the species it tracks. It says humans are intentionally — and often illegally — hunting too many wild birds and terrestrial mammals for their populations to be able to recover. They’re also unintentionally killing too many marine species as bycatch — fish, dolphins, and other non-targeted animals that get caught in the industrial fishing process. Since the 1970s, populations of migratory fish species have declined by 90 percent, and nearly every fish species the CMS tracks now faces a “high risk of extinction.”

The decline of migratory species also has severe implications for humans. As noted in the new report, migratory species provide critical “ecosystem services” that benefit humans by dispersing seeds and pollinating food crops that people eat, as well as supporting livelihoods for fishers and farmers and maintaining healthy ecosystems. “If environments aren’t healthy for other species, then they’re unlikely to be healthy for people,” Rodewald said. 

Migratory species can also directly mitigate climate change. Large migratory animals — like humpback whales, for example — sequester carbon in their bodies and then transfer it into long-term storage in the soil or seabed after they die. Other migratory animals preserve carbon storage in grasslands by walking on and compacting the snow or soil, or producing nutrient-rich feces that keep plants healthy and prevent erosion.

To reverse migratory species’ decline, the CMS lists more than two dozen priority actions for policymakers. These include cracking down on illegal and unsustainable hunting, fishing, and bycatch; creating and protecting more natural habitats; and phasing out toxic pollution from sources like plastics, pesticides, and lead weights used in fishing. The report also recommends global coordination to limit light and noise pollution, which kill millions of birds and marine animals every year.

Crucially, many of the interventions recommended by the CMS would have co-benefits for the climate. Restoring mangrove ecosystems, for instance, could support migratory green turtles and dugongs while also pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it into biomass. And stopping destructive overfishing practices can protect fish while helping to preserve the ocean’s crucial role as a carbon sink.

The U.N.’s conservation conference in Uzbekistan began on Monday and is scheduled to end on Saturday. Delegates are expected to review more specific action plans for a number of particularly vulnerable migratory species, and to consider new species for inclusion under the CMS — the report says there are nearly 400 “threatened and near-threatened” species that could benefit from being listed. Nonbinding global guidelines for light pollution, under development since last year, are also expected to be presented for adoption. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 1 in 5 UN-tracked migratory species at risk of extinction on Feb 13, 2024.

Did you know that Americans waste more than 40% of the food produced annually? And…

The post We Earthlings: Don’t Be a Hoarder, Reduce Food Waste appeared first on Earth911.

A first-ever United Nations report — State of the World’s Migratory Species — has found that more than 22 percent of migratory species are at risk of extinction globally due to overexploitation, habitat destruction and climate change.

The report was launched by the UN’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) at the opening of the CMS COP14 wildlife conservation conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

“Today’s report clearly shows us that unsustainable human activities are jeopardizing the future of migratory species – creatures who not only act as indicators of environmental change but play an integral role in maintaining the function and resilience of our planet’s complex ecosystems,” said Inger Andersen, UN Environment Programme executive director, in a press release. “The global community has an opportunity to translate this latest science of the pressures facing migratory species into concrete conservation action. Given the precarious situation of many of these animals, we cannot afford to delay, and must work together to make the recommendations a reality.”

The report also found that while some CMS-listed migratory species are improving, 44 percent are experiencing population declines. Almost all fish listed under CMS — 97 percent — are at risk of extinction.

According to the report, extinction risk is increasing for migratory species overall, not just those who are listed under CMS.

Key Biodiversity Areas are essential for the protection of threatened species, but 51 percent of those recognized as important for migratory animals listed under CMS are not protected.

Three quarters of CMS-listed species were found to be impacted by habitat degradation, loss and fragmentation — from activities like energy infrastructure, the expansion of transportation and agriculture — while seven of ten were affected by overexploitation, including overfishing, unsustainable hunting and capturing non-target animals, as seen in fisheries.

Pollution, invasive species and climate change were also pinpointed as having major impacts on migratory species.

Worldwide, there are 399 threatened or near threatened migratory species that are not listed under CMS at this time.

The report encouraged governments not to disturb migration paths and habitats when installing pipelines, dams, wind turbines and other infrastructure, reported Reuters.

“Migratory species rely on a variety of specific habitats at different times in their lifecycles. They regularly travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to reach these places. They face enormous challenges and threats along the way, as well at their destinations where they breed or feed. When species cross national borders, their survival depends on the efforts of all countries in which they are found. This landmark report will help underpin much-needed policy actions to ensure that migratory species continue to thrive around the world,” said CMS Executive Secretary Amy Fraenkel in the press release.

Migratory species are vital to the functioning of the planet’s ecosystems. They provide essential benefits, such as the transportation of key nutrients, pollination and carbon sequestration.

The report mostly focused on the 1,189 species listed under CMS that CMS Parties have recognized as being in need of international protection. It also includes analysis associated with more than 3,000 other migratory species not listed under CMS.

CMS-listed species are those who are in need of synchronized international action in order to improve their conservation status, or who are under extinction risk across much or all of their range.

Listing under CMS translates to a need for species to have international conservation cooperation. Addressing migratory species decline necessitates coordinated action between the private sector, governments and others.

Kelly Malsch, the report’s lead author and head of the Species Programme at UNEP-WCMC, said the nature of migration makes it difficult to protect these animals, as some travel thousands of miles across the borders of many countries, the BBC reported.

“Whether it is birds, or animals on land, or those swimming in our oceans, they are interacting with different country regulations which highlights the need for consistent approaches,” Malsch told the BBC.

Many of the threats migratory species face are worldwide drivers of environmental change that affect climate change and biodiversity loss.

Temperature changes can disturb the timing of animal migrations, cause extreme weather, drought and wildfires and lead to heat stress.

In the last three decades, 70 migratory species listed under CMS have become more endangered, including the Egyptian vulture, the wild camel and the steppe eagle. At the same time, only 14 listed species have seen an improvement in their conservation status, including humpback whales, blue whales, the black-faced spoonbill and the white-tailed sea eagle.

Fish are suffering the most, with migratory sharks, sturgeons and rays seeing 90 percent population declines since the 1970s.

In addition to highlighting concerns, the report also provides recommendations for action, including expanding and strengthening efforts to deal with the unsustainable and illegal taking of migratory species and the incidental capture of species; increasing the identification, connection, protection and effective management of important migratory locations; addressing with urgency those species most in danger of extinction; increasing efforts to deal with noise, light, plastics and chemical pollution, as well as climate change; and considering the expansion of CMS-listed species to include more migratory species who are at risk and in need of international and national attention.

In order to improve the status of migratory species, the report also recommends mapping and protecting feeding, breeding and stopover locations.

“There is hope,” Andersen said, as reported by the BBC.

According to Fraenkel, CMS will be implementing a new technical assistance program for nations to more effectively protect habitats, Reuters reported.

Contributors to the report included the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Zoological Society of London and BirdLife International.

Environmentalists have encouraged governments to keep their promise under the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to protect 30 percent of global land and sea for nature by 2030.

“If governments do everything they have committed to do, then the next (UN report) will have some good news,” said Susan Lieberman, Wildlife Conservation Society’s vice-president of international policy, who is attending CMS COP14, as reported by Reuters.

The post More Than 22% of Migrating Species at Risk of Extinction, UN Report Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Ocean currents are Earth’s climate regulators, distributing solar radiation and preventing regional temperatures from being more extreme.

A new study has found that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) — an important climate-regulating system of ocean currents — is headed toward a tipping point, though scientists aren’t sure how soon it will occur.

“The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) effectively transports heat and salt through the global ocean and strongly modulates regional and global climate,” the study says. “From proxy records, it has been suggested that the AMOC is currently in its weakest state in over a millennium.”

The study by scientists from the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht in the Netherlands, “Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course,” was published in the journal Science Advances.

The researchers used computer modeling and historical data to develop an early warning index for the collapse of AMOC. They were alarmed by how fast the system of ocean currents is predicted to collapse once it reaches a tipping point.

“What surprised us was the rate at which tipping occurs,” said René van Westen, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in climate physics and physical oceanography at Utrecht University, as The Guardian reported. “It will be devastating.”

The scientists found that AMOC is on a swiftly shifting course that will have extreme effects on a large swath of the planet.

AMOC, the ocean’s conveyor belt  — which includes a portion of the Gulf Stream — brings warmth and nutrients like carbon from tropical waters to the Arctic, where the water cools and sinks. The pattern distributes energy, helping to temper the effects of global heating caused by humans’ burning of fossil fuels.

The rapid melting of Arctic ice sheets and Greenland glaciers is causing an enormous amount of freshwater to rush into the ocean, which gets in the way of the sinking of the warmer salt water.

The collapse of AMOC would alter global weather, making the Southern Hemisphere even hotter, expanding ice in the Arctic southward and cooling northwestern Europe by nine to 27 degrees Fahrenheit, reported The Associated Press. It would also disrupt rainfall patterns worldwide. The effects could lead to widespread water and food shortages.

“We are moving closer (to the collapse), but we’re not sure how much closer,” van Westen said, as The Associated Press reported. “We are heading towards a tipping point.”

Van Westen said AMOC’s collapse will most likely not happen for a century, but the timing is “the million-dollar question, which we unfortunately can’t answer at the moment.”

Since 1950, AMOC has weakened by 15 percent, prior research has said, as reported by The Guardian.

The new study looked for alarm bells in the Atlantic Ocean’s salinity levels between Buenos Aires and Cape Town. Using computer modeling, the researchers simulated changes to the world’s climate across two millenia. The results showed a slow decline could result in AMOC’s rapid collapse in less than a century.

“It also depends on the rate of climate change we are inducing as humanity,” van Westen said, as The Associated Press reported.

The study added that, if AMOC collapses, Atlantic sea levels would rise by more than three feet in some areas, flooding coastal cities, reported The Guardian. The Amazon’s dry and wet seasons would become inverted, possibly pushing the rainforest past a tipping point as well.

The speed of the changes would be “so abrupt and severe that they would be near impossible to adapt to in some locations,” said Tim Lenton, a climate scientist from University of Exeter who did not participate in the research, as The Associated Press reported.

Van Westen highlighted the need for humans to act to curb the climate crisis.

“We are moving towards it. That is kind of scary. We need to take climate change much more seriously,” van Westen said, as reported by The Guardian.

The post Atlantic Ocean Current Weakening, Heading Toward Tipping Point, Study Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

News of plastic-eating enzymes and insects has been making headlines in recent years. Take, for example, fungi that digests plastic in coastal salt marshes, or the greater wax moth caterpillar that can live on polyethylene in its larval stage. However, to utilize these plastic-eating organisms, scientists would need to be able to breed them in large numbers.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have come up with a potential solution to this problem by developing an artificial worm gut that can break down plastics without requiring extensive worm breeding. The scientists published their results in the journal Environment International.

A separate 2020 study found that Zophobas atratus worms have gut bacteria that can break down common plastics, but the scientists from NTU Singapore noted that this method of breaking down plastics isn’t viable for the scale of plastics, because the worms eat and break down the plastic slowly and require a lot of maintenance to breed them in high numbers.

“A single worm can only consume about a couple of milligrams of plastic in its lifetime, so imagine the number of worms that would be needed if we were to rely on them to process our plastic waste,” Cao Bin, an associate professor of the university’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said in a statement. “Our method eliminates this need by removing the worm from the equation. We focus on boosting the useful microbes in the worm gut and building an artificial ‘worm gut’ that can efficiently break down plastics.”  

So the team from NTU Singapore found a way to recreate the plastic-digesting worm gut by developing microbial communities in flasks. The researchers set up three different groups of the worms and fed them diets consisting of different plastics: high-density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS). A control group of worms was fed oatmeal.

The worms were fed their specified diets for 30 days, after which the scientists extracted the gut microbiomes and isolated them in flasks with plastics and synthetic nutrients. By doing this, the scientists noted they created a sort of “artificial worm gut” that was left at room temperature and allowed to grow over a six-week time period.

The microbiome communities developed from worms that were fed a plastic diet had a higher amount of bacteria that could break down plastics after the six weeks, the study found.

“Our study represents the first reported successful attempt to develop plastic-associated bacterial communities from gut microbiomes of plastic-fed worms,” Liu Yinan, first author of the study and a research fellow at NTU, Singapore’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said in a statement. “Through exposing the gut microbiomes to specific conditions, we were able to boost the abundance of plastic-degrading bacteria present in our artificial ‘worm gut,’ suggesting that our method is stable and replicable at scale.”  

The researchers plan to further study the microbial communities’ abilities to break down plastic. Eventually, they hope this information will help further develop more efficient and practical ways to break down plastic waste.

The post Scientists Create Artificial Worm Gut That Breaks Down Plastic appeared first on EcoWatch.

“Recyclable” labels are popping up everywhere, but companies seldom provide the information needed to actually…

The post How To Use Earth911 To Improve Your Community’s Recycling & Reuse Results appeared first on Earth911.

Clothing and textile recycling has historically been scarcely available to consumers. It has yet to…

The post Earth911 Podcast: EVRNU’s Stacy Flynn On Creating Circular Fiber For Sustainable Fashion appeared first on Earth911.

Dirt, it turns out, isn’t just worm poop. It’s also a humongous receptacle of carbon, some 2.5 trillion tons of it — three times more than all the carbon in the atmosphere.

That’s why if you ask a climate wonk about the U.S. farm bill — the broad, trillion-dollar spending package Congress is supposed to pass this year (after failing to do so last year) — they’ll probably tell you something about the stuff beneath your feet. The bill to fund agricultural and food programs could put a dent in the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, some environmental advocates say, if it does one thing in particular: Help farmers store carbon in their soil. 

The problem is, no one really knows how much carbon farmers can store in their soil. 

“There’s still a ton of research that’s needed,” said Cristel Zoebisch, who analyzes federal agriculture policy at Carbon180, a nonprofit that promotes carbon removal.

Farmers and ranchers interact with carbon more than you might think. Draining a bog to plant rows of soybeans, for example, unleashes a lot of carbon into the air, while planting rows of shrubs and trees on a farm — a practice called alley cropping — does just the opposite, pulling the element out of the air and putting it into the earth. If America’s growers and herders made sure the carbon on their land stayed underneath their crops and their cows’ hooves, then some scientists say the planet would warm quite a bit less. After all, agriculture accounts for some 10 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions. 

“We’re really good at producing a lot of corn, a lot of soybeans, a lot of agricultural commodities,” Zoebisch said, but farmers’ gains in productivity have come at the expense of soil carbon. “That’s something we can start to fix in the farm bill.”

For more than a year, climate advocates have been eyeing the bill as an opportunity to increase funding and training for farmers who want to adopt “climate smart” practices. According to the Department of Agriculture, that label can apply to a range of methods, such as planting cover crops like rye or clover after a harvest or limiting how much a field gets tilled. Corn farmers can be carbon farmers, too. 

But experts say the reality is a bit more opaque. There’s still a lot that scientists don’t know about how dirt works, and they disagree about the amount of carbon that farmers can realistically remove from the air and lock up in their fields. 

Zoebisch and other advocates say that for the farm bill to be a true success, it’ll have to go even further than incentivizing carbon farming. Congress, they say, should also fund researchers to verify that those practices are, in fact, removing carbon from the atmosphere.  

Right now, there’s pretty much no good way for a farmer to know how much carbon they’re storing on their land. Current techniques for sampling soil and measuring carbon levels are really expensive and require equipment that’s hard to use, Zoebisch said. It’s a lot more complicated than sending buckets of dirt to a room full of scientists. Researchers need to drill more than a foot deep into the ground and exhume a ‘core’ that has to be handled with care to avoid compacting or disturbing the soil on its way to a lab. 

“There are so many points where errors could be introduced,” Zoebisch said.  

Several companies are trying to make the process easier and cheaper, but new technologies haven’t scaled up yet. Beyond taking physical measurements, the USDA uses a model to estimate levels of soil carbon that’s based on severely limited data, and its projections are highly uncertain, so that it’s pretty much useless at the local level, said Jonathan Sanderman, a soil scientist and carbon program director at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts. “You can’t really tell a farmer, ‘This is the exact benefit.’”

Scientists largely agree that cover crops help sequester some amount of carbon, but just how much is up for debate, and it varies by geography, soil type, and numerous other factors. Planting cover crops in fertile Iowa might not have the same effect as planting them in the sandy soils of Southern California. 

“There is uncertainty in the literature, but from a first-principles standpoint it makes sense that cover crops should gain carbon, because you’re capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere — a couple tons per hectare — that you wouldn’t have captured” otherwise, Sanderman said. “It’s the nuance we don’t understand.”

Timothy Searchinger, an agriculture and forestry researcher at Princeton University and the World Resources Institute, said he’s a fan of cover crops because they prevent precious topsoil from getting washed or blown away and nitrogen from polluting rivers and streams, but he thinks their potential climate benefits — and those of other practices like reducing tillage — are often exaggerated. Rather than fixate on soil carbon, he said the farm bill should focus on making agriculture more efficient. Helping farmers produce more food on existing farmland could save carbon-rich forests and peatlands from being cleared to meet demand for crops and livestock. 

Still, Searchinger acknowledged there might be at least a little potential to store carbon on agricultural lands, and said he didn’t want the USDA to stop assisting farmers who want to plant cover crops or try out other climate-smart practices. 

Congress allocated almost $20 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to programs that do just that. Some $300 million of it is going to the USDA to ramp up efforts over the coming years to measure carbon in the soil. Currently, the agency draws on long-term data from only 50 sites across the country, Sanderman said. The Inflation Reduction Act funding could increase that number to several thousand.

That money was “an incredible first investment,” Zoebisch said. “This is going to be great for the next four years of funding. But then what happens after that?” Zoebisch and others want to see funding for soil carbon research made permanent in the farm bill.

Fulfilling that wish — and the many others held by climate advocates — hinges most of all on a divided Congress’ ability to reach an agreement. The farm bill expired at the end of September, when lawmakers were busy fighting over other things, like how to avoid a government shutdown and who should (or shouldn’t) be Speaker of the House. So instead of agreeing on a new bill, they extended the old one by a year. 

The extension kept money temporarily flowing to programs that prop up farmers and assist families in need of food. It didn’t, however, do anything to tackle climate change or advance anyone’s understanding of how much carbon is in the mush of decaying plants, bacteria, fungi, and worm poop beneath your feet. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How much carbon can farmers store in their soil? Nobody’s sure. on Feb 12, 2024.

Last week, a long, narrow section of the Earth’s atmosphere funneled trillions of gallons of water eastward from the Pacific tropics and unleashed it on California. This weather event, known as an atmospheric river, broke rainfall records, dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of the state, and knocked out power for 800,000 residents. At least nine people died in car crashes or were killed by falling trees. But the full brunt of the storm’s health impacts may not be felt for months. 

The flooding caused by intensifying winter rainstorms in California is helping to spread a deadly fungal disease called coccidioidomycosis, or Valley fever. “Hydro-climate whiplash is increasingly wide swings between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles. Humans are finding it difficult to adapt to this new pattern. But fungi are thriving, Swain said. Valley fever, he added, “is going to become an increasingly big story.” 

Cases of Valley fever in California broke records last year after nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers slammed the state and caused widespread, record-breaking flooding. Last month, the California Department of Public Health put out an advisory to health care providers that said it recorded 9,280 new cases of Valley fever with onset dates in 2023 — the highest number the department has ever documented. In a statement provided to Grist, the California Department of Public Health said that last year’s climate and disease pattern indicate that there could be “an increased risk of Valley fever in California in 2024.”

“If you look at the numbers, it’s astonishing,” said Shangxin Yang, a clinical microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “About 15 years ago in our lab, we only saw maybe one or two cases a month. Now, it’s two or three cases a week.” 

Valley fever — named for California’s San Joaquin Valley, where the disease was discovered in a farmworker in the late 1800s — is caused by the spores of a fungus called Coccidioides. When inhaled, the spores can cause severe illness in humans and some animal species, including dogs. The fungus is particularly sensitive to climate extremes. Coccidioides doesn’t thrive in regions of the U.S. that get year-round rain, nor can it withstand persistent drought. 

What the spores really love is exactly the type of rain-drought cycle that California is caught in. Until last year’s series of drought-busting atmospheric rivers, California was in the throes of a long-term drought pattern; 2000 to 2021 was the driest two-decade stretch in the Southwest in 12 centuries. Climate models predict the Golden State will endure more droughts in the future. Rising global temperatures fuel dry conditions by sucking moisture out of the soil and depleting California’s water reserves. Meanwhile, the warmer atmosphere is also supercharging atmospheric rivers as they move from the tropics to the West Coast, causing the “rivers in the sky” to unleash more rain than they would on a planet untouched by human-made warming.

The oscillation between extreme dryness and extreme wetness causes Coccidioides to flourish. During rain events, flushes of fungi colonize the soil. As the ground dries out, the invisible spores can be lifted out of the soil by a bulldozer, a rake, a hiking boot, an earthquake, or even a strong gust of wind. When those flying spores land in soil, they begin to reproduce. If they’re sucked through an open mouth or nostril, they colonize the lungs. 

The progression of the illness in humans depends on the strength of the individual’s immune system: The majority of people who contract Valley fever — some 60 percent — will never know they crossed paths with killer spores, because their immune system is able to rapidly vanquish the fungal intruder. But quashing Valley fever isn’t always a given, even for healthy individuals. The disease disproportionately impacts Latinos, Filipinos, Black people, Native Americans, and pregnant people for reasons researchers and physicians are still trying to puzzle out. 

When it causes symptoms, Valley fever starts with a fever, headache, or cough — similar to the symptoms of COVID-19, a disease it is often confused with. If the immune system can’t fight off the Coccidioides spores, the illness can move past its initial phase and become a chronic condition that produces a severe cough, chest pain, weight loss, pneumonia, and nodules in the lungs. This stage, known as disseminated Valley fever, can also cause skin lesions and ulcers, swollen joints, meningitis — swelling of the membranes surrounding the spinal cord and brain — and even death. Between 1 and 5 percent of Valley fever cases reach the disseminated stage. Antifungal medications can help hold Valley fever at bay, but recovery ultimately depends on the individual’s immunological defenses. There is no cure for the disease, and approximately 200 people in the United States die from disseminated Valley fever every year. 

There’s evidence that Coccidioides is already taking advantage of a warming U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that Valley fever cases in the U.S. rose from 2,271 in 1998 to 20,003 cases in 2019 — a 780 percent increase. In Arizona, where two-thirds of Valley fever diagnoses typically occur, cases rose 600 percent. But Coccidioides spores have cropped up in new regions in recent years, expanding through Southern California and into Northern California, even up into the drier parts of Oregon and Washington states. The rate of growth of Valley fever in California is higher than in Arizona; cases there rose more than 1,000 percent over the same time period.  “What kind of disease do you see a 1,000 percent increase in a matter of two decades?” Yang asked. “This is one of the few.” 

Some percentage of these cases can be attributed to increased public awareness of the disease and a related uptick in testing for it. But the size of the spike, experts told Grist, cannot be explained by testing rates alone. Climate change, researchers hypothesize, is supercharging Valley fever, and increasingly intense atmospheric rivers — responsible for roughly 50 percent of the West Coast’s annual water supply — are creating ideal conditions for the spores to spread. 

The scale of Valley fever in California in the coming years depends in large part on what happens to the state’s soil. “Many areas that have blooms of the Valley fever fungus never get disturbed, so it’s not an issue,” said Antje Lauer, an environmental microbiologist at California State University Bakersfield. Housing and energy infrastructure and other landscape-level changes kick up soil and produce dust. She worries that as developers build more infrastructure and expand into virgin areas of the state, and as climate change creates ever more convenient conditions for Coccidiodes, Valley fever will pose an increasingly profound threat to public health. Last year was a harbinger of things to come, Lauer said. “We will see more cases.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Intensifying atmospheric rivers are leading to a surge in Valley fever cases in California on Feb 12, 2024.